Beyond the Basics: Working with Plot Style Tables in AutoCAD 2017

hello everybody welcome to build your AutoCAD IQ right on this day September 1 2016 while September already seems like just yesterday that it was August hey welcome to beyond the basics working with table style tables in AutoCAD 2017 today's presenter my colleague Ryan bales and I am bokor cocoa and with us we also have naman my Sawalha who will be moderating I'll be moderating as well as Ryan will be doing our presentation today so before we get started and talk a little bit more about our webinars and the webinar topic itself I am going to go ahead and throw out a poll many of you are used to this and some of you are not we're gonna find out who is and who isn't right now so the question being is this your first Autodesk help webinar so far at a hundred percent know a lot of repeats we love it we love seeing you guys back here always you get to have you back and for those who are new welcome hopefully this will be a good experience for you and you will be one of those who returns for future webinars alright I'll go ahead and close this one let's just kind of plop it out there for everybody and let you see those results there so that's quite a differential there and as far as those who have been here and those who haven't so one more you know we'll have one more at the conclusion but one more right now and basically which autocad-based application do you use this is always helpful you know we tailor the these sessions right here for AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT and everything should work on AutoCAD LT unless specified but we are looking and there are rumors that we're going to be doing webinars for the vertical applications such as NEP architecture autocad electric civil 3d etc so that should be showing up well in the rumor mill that is right now it's already available in the rumor mill but we'll see what happens I'm gonna close this here and let's take a look we have about 33% of you using AutoCAD 32% using LT so pretty good there 22% using some of the verticals on the architectural side and then lava cat civil3d users well good thing is what we're gonna be showing today is applicable to all versions of AutoCAD so let's talk a little bit more about our webinars this is something I have to do and it's a good thing because it'll allow you to see what's coming up so obviously this week we're working with the plop style tables and AutoCAD September 8th we're gonna going to have another third dimension track introduction to cloud rendering on the 15th to our tips and tricks' is really how to set up a template for your office and then our back to basics September 22nd is an introduction to tables so some good stuff coming up as always you can watch any past webinars on our YouTube channel build your AutoCAD IQ and there's a quite a lengthy playlist we've been doing these since I think early 2015 or maybe it was late 2014 quite a while now datasets that we use in the webinars are also available and we encourage you to check out our webinar landing page as 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Q&A to answer anything that wasn't answered or had been asked a lot in that chat session is recorded again so YouTube as noted previously alright don't forget about our a KN or a list knowledge network we have lots of articles available there for troubleshooting for getting up to speed as well as downloads for things like offline help service packs hot fixes templates language packs etc so a lot of good information to find there I'm not gonna let Ryan speak a little bit about our agenda well thanks Fokker so today we're going to talk about plot styles we're gonna primarily land on CTB's and color dependent plotting mainly because that's the default and most of you should be familiar with CTB's so look like a little bit about what they are where they're located I'm gonna run through creating a plot style table from scratch and I'll show you different ways we can go about doing that well apply one to a layout and see what it looks like and then we'll kind of finish out with trying to find issues and problems that can occur with using color dependent plotting so when we dive into CTB's we'll talk a little bit about plot style tables again where they're stored what they're used for line types line weights etc the default in AutoCAD and we'll finish out by creating a new style real quick here in a minute all right Thank You Ryan and I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to you so that you can give your little presentation here and we hope everybody will enjoy this feel free to leave questions in that chat window well thanks again Volker so first of all let's talk a little bit about what our plot style tables so this is straight from the help document a collection of plot styles assigned to a layout or model tab there are two types of plot style tables color dependent and named so again today we're going to spend a little bit more time on clutter dependent plot styles which are called CTB files as most of you should be familiar with what they are so CTB's or color depend upon style tables use an object's color to determine characteristics such as line weight every red object in a drawing is plotted the same way while you can edit plot styles in the color dependent plot style table you cannot add or delete plot styles there are 256 plot Styles in a color dependent plot style one for each color so with that and knowing that color dependent plotting is what we're the land let's start in by showing you where CTB's are and where you might normally see them so by default you don't really see CTB's actively there's storm when you plot so for starters let's look here and you can see in my plot window in the upper right hand corner we have a table column called plot style table and this is a drop-down that allows us to pick a specific CTB to plot with or a plot style table this button here allows us to edit or configure the plot style table and then if you turn you plot styles on when you're plotting or plot with plot Styles those are affected when you plot so you can effectively use the plot styles this way you if you shut this off you will not be pretty both styles so for starters remember every time you plot to make sure that this is turned on once it's on it doesn't get shot off unless you shut it off so the main thing that we want to make sure is that you know where plots files are so by default plot files are located on your C Drive which if you go into options in file path under printer support file path there is a plot style table search path under there you can see the location here you can see it's in my users username app data roaming and then you go all the way down to the version plot Styles so by default all of our plot styles will be located here so when you make a new one unless you specify its location or you move the wizard that comes with AutoCAD it will be located there I've got to pull up an explorer here so we'll pull that up so here's that exact folder and you can see all of my plot styles you can see CTB's the color dependent and st bees which are named plot styles we won't cover st bees in this webinar nearly as much we may answer a few questions if we have time but we're going to focus on color dependent plotting so you can see here's my back to basics CTB or beyond the basic CTB sorry so we'll use this one in AutoCAD and and I'll also show you how to create a new one so now that we know where that these are by default we can also set then create a second location on a network drive I won't show that here but for you guys to set those up it would be pretty simple in options under the same location printer support file path on style table search paths you can simply add a path and map that to your network drive so from here let's jump right into creating one so as you can see I've got a layout space I've got an xref in here you can see the colors are a little bit faded from the xref that's normal so what we're gonna do is we're just going to do a test print and just kind of see this is my beyond the basic CTP but for this let's do a none because by default there is no named plot style setup and that's important to remember that some of you may not actually be use this by default they're not set up so we'll do a preview and you can see that everything prints true to what it is shown in the model so now it might be on the basics which isn't really set up yet you can also see that I've got some things turn to black and for the most part everything's pretty normal so what we'll do from here is we'll show you a little bit about creating a plot style and then we'll edit it so to create a new one there's two different methods under plot style table you can go to new I prefer this method because I don't have to leave AutoCAD but if you choose to go to the location there's also an add a plot style table wizard we'll do this one first and then we'll jump in on a cut and create a second one so when you launch the wizard it'll be a little bit older so you may not be familiar with this type of dialog box but that's it right so we'll create one from scratch I could use an existing one but we'll just start over and just do a brand new one so in table type I want to do a color dependent plot style which is a CTV and not a named while name plot style for this one which would be an STV okay next and here let's do beyond basics to let's hit next so from here the plot file is say Earth's created we need to make sure it's in the correct location so we'll do that here in a moment we could enter the plot style table editor but I'm going to wait to do that in AutoCAD so this option is quite important to remember as well if you enable this box the plot style table for new and pre-owned ok 2017 English drawings it'll be the default so if you are creating a default for your company or CAD standards this is a good checkbox to remember as it will apply that but you have to remember it may not apply to every session so you'll have to check what everyone's computer so let's just leave that off and we'll hit finish so now you can see that my beyond the basics to CTB is here with the t capitalized that looks kind of funky so let's rename that and now it matches pretty well so we're going to jump back into AutoCAD and we can see if we cancel out of this and hit plot to refresh this by beyond the basics CTB not showing here yet so so if it doesn't show in there we need to make sure that it's in the right location so there it is so we may have to restart autocad but that's pretty normal hope there is so took a second to refresh but here it is so here's our beyond the basics to see TB so now that we've got one created through there we can show you the quick way to do it that I prefer which is in here same dialog box but because you're creating it through this session should be pretty immediate and we'll start from scratch with this one we're gonna call it beyond that base it's three hit next we'll use it for the current drawing which is room important to remember when you do it inside of AutoCAD this chefs checkbox is set by default and pretty handy if that's what you're using before so we'll hit finish so beyond the basics three is immediately loaded as we created it through AutoCAD so from here let's jump into editing and we'll go through some of the settings when you open the plot style table editor you can see by default we're set on form view the general tab will display the type of information there's 255 styles one for each color this is a legacy version can be used to import old DWG s by default apply global scale is not on table view allows you a little bit condensed uh view of the styles then each color represents a particular style in the plot style table so in form views will role hang out over on the right you'll see the properties there's colors dither grayscale pin number virtual pin number screening line type and the rest of the lion settings for the most part you probably will not use pin number or virtual pin number I prefer to leave those as automatic most of us don't use physical pin plotters so these are a good idea just to leave this automatic unless you explicitly know what they should be dither you can leave on like it says if you hover over a donation water uses they're going to approximate colors but dot patterns grayscale is really important if you're printing black and white it's it can really save you money on ink or toner and it does help with coloring so we'll use the object color for color one this is also standard this means that when we plot with color one which is red it'll actually plot as bread so if we were to change this to black and to use grayscale color one would actually print as black that's important to remember when you're printing black and white as any colors in the CTB not set to black or grayscale will print true so you will print partial color partial black and white which would really just be a color printing so from here we will look at screening screening is important if you're trying to fade colors and line weights out say you have an existing file existing equipment or something that you would need to be faded in the background a background that's not yours that's for screening is really important line type this is really good to remember too you can override line types set by object or by layer so if you have an object line type and you use set use object line type it will defer to that an object line type or color will override a layer color or line type so the CTB kind of overrides those and so we need to be careful I generally leave all of these as use objects so that we don't override what we already have set up line weights line in type or in style join style and fill style I would leave those as is unless you again explicitly know what these should be these are really languages are really important to fade out if you have existing stuff but if you don't have that set up in your layer you can also do that here globally so for this example we're gonna leave color one - black and gray scale on we're going to turn color four to about 80% screening that'll lighten color for we'll also turn it on grayscale we can use object color but alternative black just so it looks a little bit better one of the other colors I know we have in our drawing is color - which is yellow so I want to make this 50% screening so it's really light and we're going to use grayscale and turn it to black so this is kind of a brief overview of the properties or the editor you can edit line weights here you can use the description so if we wanted to use color - as our say let's use it as notes and we want to use color for as existing and then we want to use color one as you know outline so now our descriptions will be held here so if anybody's curious and they open this up they can see so from here we need to save and close and then in our plot window we also have the option to apply that layout if you watched Zach and Mike's webinar they went over plotting a lot more in depth in bulk we're going to do we'll talk a little bit about planning to PDF for quality assurance for quality checking but we're really focused on pot style tables so for this I'm not gonna hit apply to layout because we're going to show you a little in a little bit about page setups so we're gonna hit preview and you can see that all the colors that I change that existed in my model are now printing it's black or grayscale yellow which was this North arrow is printing quite lightly and some of the cyan stuff is a little bit darker but it's hard to tell at 80% so you can see - if I were to print right now this green stuff would print green so it's important to remember in in the CTB or a killer dependent plotting you need to be very specific if you're gonna print black and white so knowing that we're gonna jump back in we're gonna go to color 3 which is green we're gonna make this black contain the screening a little bit down to 70% and we're gonna change the line weight 0.09 this will lighten it up a little bit throw in greyscale on so we'll hit preview see now you can see the color green is pretty light let's line thickness is a lot less and it shows up pretty well so that right there is the plot style table creation and editing so from here we need to jump into what happens when you set an object color so I have another viewport here and these objects are all set randomly to color by object so if we go in here and we pick say this this line on this pipe and we go to properties we can say that I set it to blue so now what happens when we print is that because we're overriding the layer color of new line which if we go into our layer manager we can see that new line is actually set to reen so if we print and we want to use the layer of new line and we'll set DW to PDF and then let's just make sure this is 11 I 17 will hit preview we can see that these actually print true to green so this is why when you use the color dependent plot style you want to make sure that the colors are not set to by object unless you have that object color setup it usually is a big problem if you have say a color out there in the range of I don't know in the 200s or 100 these main colors can be pretty easily set up in the plot style table they're shown first but any of the other range of colors it's pretty easy to look that one 70 looks pretty similar to color number 5 but it's not so when you go to print that it will print as true color 170 so what we need to do is we need to get these colors back on tube by layer if we're going to print by layer so to do that I usually quickly go into model space select my objects do a quick select will pick the objects and we want to need to do a layer of my color if you do it by color I pick not equal to by layer and select and all 575 objects I put on a bad layer or bad color and now be reset to my layer so now you can see there by a layer so in addition I put some of these objects on a bad line type so you can see that I put these on hidden and I over wrote their line wait he's going to also be set to my layer here and control them layer and then in the CCD file so we'll leave those for now so jumping back into our viewport will close properties what's the quick print just see how it looks so we use our previous which is our new PDF I left my 17 beyond the basics 3 I'm just gonna hit apply and then we'll hit preview so now we can see that everything that was printing as the wrong color is now printing back to how it's the finding the CTB except for that which color does not reside in our CTP is as being edited so this stuff will print is blue also the hidden lines that we had are showing up as continuous lines so that's either a layer control or an object control so from here I think the best thing to do is to show you a page setup so back in our main CTP demo page we have our normal drawing that we first worked with and we'd have our colors set up in our CTP so the next thing to do is to set up your page setup Zak and Mike again talk about this a little bit but from the aspect of a CTB it's important to go in here and modify your page setup to be correct as you can see it looks identical to the plot window except for two different things you cannot plot or apply the layout or sorry three different things you also can display plot styles so this will allow you to set up a page setup with our given plot style so we're gonna pick beyond the basics 3 and we're gonna click display when we click OK and we click set current we can see the CTP demo is not set to be on the basics when we hit close you can see that every object is now displaying as our plot style calls out so our CTP has defined that yellow is light so now I can actually see that that's how it will print when I click print this is helpful to see if there are objects just right off the bat yeah don't show up right so if we do that again here we can go to page setup manager we can set beyond the basics through our current it'll also change by layer which is the sheet that I changed stuff back to my layer and hit close so now we can see we have these blue objects that are printing incorrectly if you turn line weight off and on you can see a little bit better I think it works better in model space what's going to print that way but now we have a pretty good indication of what we're gonna print just by having it pre-loaded in our page setup so with page setups we also have a different couple options in pot and publish under options so we can set our default printer again ii might talk about this too so it'd be a really good idea to go and check out their webinar after this one if you have any more questions about plotting generally and then so again for this we're gonna focus on the plot style table settings we're going to leave everything as is and so in here you have a different dialog box where we're specifying the default plus i'll behavior for new drunks is you use color dependent on styles or CTB's instead of STDs so we can also now set our default plot style table so in here in a set beyond the basics 3 as our new default plot style because it doesn't have specific styles these do not change you can add or edit possbile tables but again with a kind of dependent you have the plots the house that are for each color so we'll hit OK we'll hit apply and okay and then we're gonna create a new drawing I'll just use the default template that's set up here for AutoCAD let's see I think I'll just well that's what happens when you have that many different versions of AutoCAD and stuff know where your templates are so it looks like we can jump into shares all right so 2017 yeah this is exactly that our AutoCAD look like urine roaming I shouldn't impro him data but I can go to Romi let's we'll do it from here but in here I know well wave O'Connor I are trying to find new templates we'll just use the default advanced steel template so this is basically just a default 3d template based on the AutoCAD templates so sorry for that so in layout what will do this will create a new layout just like we did before what I want to do is I want to go back to my other drawing and I want to save my drawing and what we're going to do is we're going to import our or layout space so we're gonna do is go into here and we're going to go from template oops and I'm sorry let's just do a brand new one it's easier that way so well xref our drawing and our drawing is located in my beyond the basics folder pot style tables to slow xref in our file on style people - so this is our drawing that we're going to use to set up our CT B and C so other than 0 0 0 the top won't zoom in a little bit now what we're gonna do is we're going to check our page setup thanks because I use a different template our end style table or pontil table is not set right so we'll have to put prick this we're gonna turn it back on and we'll use AutoCAD DWG to PDF all right so we have our options set to beyond the basics for new templates this is our default style so from here on out we need to make sure that you guys know a little bit more about the layer overrides and stuff and then I think we'll jump in to the last little bit of discussing CTP source STDs and we can do some Q&A so in our so let's jump back to our other drawing so in this drawing when we go into layer you can see that we have all these different settings we have our plot style set for color that's because these are numbered we have our review port settings so we can viewport override I think the important thing to remember here is to pick known colors in your CTB if we were to change this to say 73 instead of green and then print anything that's supposed to be that color they can have it shown over here so you can see it will print a 73 and this is because our layer is set correctly even if our object set to my layer so again the other part of object is to set the object color correctly if you have something that has to print specifically and you can see because our CTP has green set and we selected our object color to green we're gonna print how our CTP has it displayed so that's a big benefit to you if you're troubleshooting why objects aren't coloring correctly for printing correctly in colors and how to get them back to normal or if you need to override a couple things to print a certain way say if you have existing stuff or new stuff and you want to highlight different options we definitely recommend setting as much as you can in the layer and then for being that way so that it's global and you'll have less problems and then the other thing to remember is when you go to print your file to owner in order to check when you're printing we also try to print a PDF and the reason we do this is because it allows us to save our PDF say here in our fonts that are beyond the basics folder and we'll print it now we can open our PDF and see that oh yeah we have a bad color so instead of sending a color print to a printer that should be printing black and white it prints with blue the other thing to remember is plot style tables do not change what the printer is actually going to set if you print in all color drawing and your printer is set to grayscale this still will print grayscale and volker mentioned to me before the webinar to remember it remind everybody that visual styles also will override everything globally so but the order is you have object your layer an object in CTB and you then your visual style so if we set our visual style as you say realistic you can see that it overrides everything to its true color and when we go to hunt that there's a good chance that it will override our CTB and we will get colors that we do not want to print the best way to avoid that is to print it in the exact visual style you need generally set it to legacy hidden would be the one or 2d wireframe which is legacy hid and so leaving shade plot displayed will help as you won't be overriding what the visual style is set to and that's your CTB won't be overridden so if we have a little time for QA or the difference between named it and colored I think will jump into named and colored for a couple minutes here and let's talk a little bit about STDs for CTV's and then we'll end with some human a and then just another reminder on sack and mike's webinar last week try to watch that if you can if you haven't already I'm sure some of you have and then it has some pretty good information on plot styles it briefed over it because they knew we were gonna cover it and then they talked a little bit about PC theories which will help configure your plotters so that you don't accidentally print color or accidentally read black and white so STP is which we didn't cover and we won't cover in depth here are called named plot styles they've named plot styles are a different level of control they've generally used his global settings or override settings they have independent plot styles not based on color but by object there's some advantages to both most everyone used the CTB's so it's a really good advantage for that they're mostly based on pretty default settings so they're not really heavily modified and you can pretty much usually see what's wrong when you probe the CTB stds have different advantage in control and line weights and pen weights you don't have to remember colors or how they affect line weights and you don't really have to use all 255 colors like a CTV has set up they can be swapped in the drawing but it requires Apple special commands so those are usually convert CPB or convert I think it's convert P styles will convert from CTB drawing to an stbb drawing and again in the options tab we have the option to set font style paper settings as default for color dependent which is a CT B or a named which is s DB supply D style policy will also help define that so the important thing to remember is what is best for you and your company my experience it was CTV's we didn't use a wide array of colors CTB's allowed us check so and a lot of it's personal preference so if we have time and we have any questions I'll open it for mocha and Amman to pass those to me yo Ryan is just to get to know mana myself always wanting to share the wealth hey thanks Ryan that that worked out pretty good I believe we may have answered most of the questions so that just shows how good you guys are and how quick I am yeah let's see come on do you have anything we can cover that a little bit more to how screening works and stuff so in our plots our table with screening we can set specific values they're based on 0 to 100 percent if you hover over screening you get the option tell you 0 reduces the color called white selecting 100 displays the color at its full intensity it's more or less a percentage dithering has to be selected for screening this I guess said this is really helpful if you're trying to fade certain objects to the background so just set it up we're going to set magenta our color 6 to about a 30% screening bitters on and we're going to set this to a color that we can see so we'll leave it as object color and we'll hit save and close and then I think we just need to hit cancel so in here we're going to jump into our objects here let's go to properties and so we can see we have all these center lines so I think the best thing to do would be to let's see what they are see so thereby centerline layer so what we'll do is we'll click select our objects by layer of centerline so the quick select allows us to pick very specific items in our drawing we probably should go over this in a webinar if we haven't use it if you can so we'll include our centerline anything that's in our drawing that equals the layer of centerline we included in a brand new selection set so we hit OK we see that all these objects are shown this centerline so now what we'll do is we'll jump over here and we'll put these on by layer but I think we should put them to magenta I already set magenta up so back in paper space we can see that these are set to magenta but they're very faded so that's the effect of screening so if we wanted to set our plot style for another color or magenta to be say it's too too light so let's go to 50 but we want to make it so it's you know for sure center lines we can go in here and we can make sure that if centers if center line is loaded we can have it so we want to overwrite it what Steve dashed we'll hit save and close and cancel so that darkens it just slightly and you can see that we have now overridden it to be Center lines so screening works to really help fade drawings or objects in drawings rather so if we preview this printing in our PDF we can see it's now set to hidden it's a light color versus a really dark color it helps to also make objects stand out say if this needed to be a hundred and we'll use the object line type and then we print those will print full color and line type by object and lightweight so line weights are also important when talking about screening in that the line weight set lower will have a more drastic effect on screening than if I set the full so if we were to set a very light and weight or line weight to point 9 or 0.05 millimeters and use a screening of say 30% that object will be very fine when printhead so you can see that it is barely there so remember when you do screening to also double-check your line weights if you're not plotting with line weights and you're using line weights remember to turn this on it if you decide not to plot with line weights and just letbe CTB to find them that is also an option you get very crisp lines that way and you have a lot less line weight problems but if you're a company that uses specific line weights remember that option needs to be enabled so that's screening in a nutshell hope that it helped a little bit come on yes thank you so much somebody had asking you that your own line weights and I guess I mean with all that options available I don't know why one would want to but you know there's always a need I'm not actually sure where you do that but I think oh yeah just go back into the pop style oh yeah oh I don't know on the layers dialog box I have no idea on that one yeah well so I'm gonna interrupt on that one you cannot you cannot add wine waves you can modify the line weight okay but that's it there's like 20 line weights in there and certainly and you can't do that through the line light box you do need to use use the CPB to modify it yeah just how it's set up I'm sure there's a registry tweak where you could probably modify them globally I'm not going to encourage that at all their tools and AutoCAD to do that you think is CTP and I we were wanting to do is see a custom line wait then really what you do is if you really if you don't use CTB's all the time you're lacking that line wait then create a CTB and just make one modification to the line wait and leave everything out else at the bye-bye object or all the other defaults I should say and so everything in AutoCAD is gonna plot according to what the layers are what but the objects are but the line weight will be overridden by your CTV hopefully that makes sense rumor because CTB's use color that it's the line weights are associated by color so even though an object line weight of 0.3 millimeters exists our CTV says that this color red will print us a very specific way so red will actually print with the object line weight unless we enable that differently here so that's also an important thing to remember when when setting line weights or screening is how your objects are set up the importance of having it by layer is pretty easily seen when you have the thick line whites or or wrong colors and that helps to keep things consistent and that's really what CTB's are about is keeping things very consistent across an entire company or drafting office in the past I've used them too you know as far as an extent as you can go and it really helps to establish dropping and drawing consistency when printing in addition printing a PDF can also help do that in order to keep things you know visibly the same so that's really plot style payables in a nutshell just to remind you guys where they're located in case we briefed over that too quickly under your main users username app data roaming on a desk the version the release English you'll see under plotters plots tiles so this is the location for 2017 says the ones that we added today one through the add a plot style table wizard and one through AutoCAD which we did which also uses the wizard just through AutoCAD you can see the different CTB's that are loaded most of them are pretty old but they've been around quite a while and they work pretty well the defaults none or a cap is another good one to start with these pretty much leave everything basic as far as if you go to the a CAD and look at it everything is used object and 100% so this is the default for a CT be easy to change and just remember you don't have to change all 255 colors just change the color as you use and that'll help you just to speed things along when you're creating a CTB yeah please do yeah so the way I've kind of used it like let's say if you use monochrome dot CPP and you use the layers to drive the line weights which is kind of better way of doing it in my opinion now but also if you use any color other than the 255 or the RGB values don't match they plot color even with the monochrome dot CTB so monochrome CTB will print the 1 through 255 colors black and white but any true color will print color right that is a very good thing that I use sometimes that would help me you know have color and black and white together right yes I don't know in the past - and I I also find that very valuable and so in what Amon is saying is when you go into here and you change green to a color the autocad color index is the 255 color is located in AutoCAD true color allows you to pick a very specific RGB value that may not match the 255 colors which allows you to print black-and-white and color so that that's actually a good point there and that is also where the sPB's are a little more powerful because you are not limited to those 255 colors you can choose any of the million colors on the true color palette using HSL or RGB factors to assign the color so that's right St B's come in very there's a little bit more to them than with the CTB's and speaking of stds I'm just going to take over for a moment because there's a customer led a question which I really don't have a proper or concise answer for and the question was do we have a recommendation or best practice for importing geometry and blocks into our company drawing with named table Styles from a drawing done by another company with a color plot style currently we have to pick a name top style per each new imported layer in the layer properties manager and yeah that can be a problem if I guess my best recommendation would be if you have all those blocks in a library drawing even if it's a CTV then create a template file based upon your STB standards insert the library drawing into that STB template with the explode option turned on that way it will explode the drawing itself but leave the blocks intact in the ste file it just have to do some tweaking to layers or such but it's a quick way for the blocks to inherit properties of your standards and chances are it has as long as the layer names are the same or you have a STB style assigned to a layer then those blocks are going to inherit that style so that that that's the way I would start out just by inserting my CTB drawing into an STV drawing and I hope that helps you could also convert the file back and forth CCB to SDB to see what it princess and the other thing too is in a block where the objects are set to by layer and the block is inserted say to layer 0 but the objects are colored that block will likely reset when exploded you can also use the burst command to keep objects the proper color just to make sure if that's been overridden and see where that lies that's a good answer for thank you and I think the other thing about STDs I did create an STP drawing real quick just to show you we can at least just glance you can see by beyond the basics version to STB will jump in it just for a brief second as we're nearing the end of our time and you can see I only have two plots tiles for my my STB the plot menu looks very similar but as the Mon pointed out I can select very specific properties or volk remember who was but about STDs i can pick a troop true color or color book or index color if i want to versus a ctv which only picks index colors and that's important to remember we can also see if we go into here you know we have our by layer settings and everything's the same with an STP drive so you really won't see that big of a difference there so I think that about wraps it up unless we have any more questions so even if we do have more questions I'd like to run my final poll and just kind of get some feedback before everybody decided to run out to lunch or or just run out on us so so I just lost my train of thought here thank you very much all righty let's go ahead and first of all do this and let's get rid of this guy and let us run that poll all right so our main question here is did you learn something new in today's session yes because we do want to make sure that these sessions are worth your time we know your time is valuable you have to get the job done so we always appreciate the fact that you've sat through our webinars and we tried to do our best to make it worthwhile and it looks like about 96 percent of you are saying yes which 95 may even go lower but in a way that's that's a good number it makes us makes us feel that the work we put into these is worth with our while as well so let me close that poll I'm just going to share it real quick and and think that is about it don't fry you will be getting a excuse me sorry about that I'm gonna just finish airing that real quick what I was going to say is that you will be receiving an email with the follow-up to all the links once everything has been posted on our website for you to download in the meantime the slide deck does have some additional resources in it regarding pop style tables the fluff style table wizard and among other items so we encourage you to check out those links as well as the other resources which are available on the a KN or Autodesk knowledge network I do believe that that is about it you can email us if you have concerns or kudos or future requests for our webinars that link is on the screen it will be in that PowerPoint deck be sure to put build your AutoCAD IQ in that subject line we have numerous webinars by numerous teams and sometimes it's hard to tell which webinar somebody is referring to when they're asking this or that so yeah it helps a lot put that subtle message in our header in the subject line of that email any other questions Oh we'll go very quickly now somebody asked how do you convert an extra or have an xref print all screen gray screen or screened out change all the layers basically to your screen color and then I learned a new variables called extra override and set it to 1 what it does is it makes all object overrides basically to set to by layer so then in your hosts drawing you can control whatever color you want it to be and that's a good variable to point out them in them on that variable is rather new we actually did a new features for AutoCAD where we discussed that particular variable but if you haven't used it if you aren't aware of it then you aren't going to know about it so Noman made a good point it's a great great function to be using it's xref override so well I think we will call it quits just because we're going to quit we looked forward to seeing you guys next week we really do and appreciate it again you guys being here Oh have a very safe holiday okay you say if we want to see you back cheers everybody

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 17,278

Keywords: autocad, autodesk, 3d, software, cad, tool, tutorial, how to, 3d modeling, autocad tutorial, cad design, modeling tutorial, autocad 2d, drafting, auto cad, autodesk subscription, technical drawing, autocad tips and tricks, Beyond the Basics, ADSK_Webinar, Build Your AutoCAD IQ!, Plotting, Printing, plot styles, print, plot, ctb, stb

Id: zMfHJUT2cO0

Length: 60min 19sec (3619 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2016